The smell of cooked meat pervaded throughout the old tavern and mingled with the ever present smell of wood rot. The Beggar’s Arms he recalled, though recollection was something less of a virtue after his eighth lager. KwilZ stared deeply into his nearly empty glass absently pushing his quills aside as they sought to obstruct his vision. It was a quiet establishment in the rural parts of Foxtrot, remote and welcoming. It made for a comfortable pit stop in his nomadic journey.

During his stay. KwilZ had befriended a local in the tavern, a brawny owl named Victor who looked just as likely to buy you a drink as punch you in the ribs. KwilZ had enjoyed much of the former, the last few rounds on Victor's hospitality, but did he like to ramble.
'We 'ad a few of 'em 'ere just last night,' Victor, the solemn expression on his face dulled by intoxication.

'Stone dead in their beds. The Benevolence rest their souls.' The owl brought his hands to his chest and steeped his open fingers in a religious gesture.

Up until that point, KwilZ wasn't listening with great intent. The minimum inflections, perhaps a nod here, a cheap laugh there, anything to play along until the magic words 'Whaddya say, two more glasses lad?' rang from the old owl's beak. But the religious sentiment had bearing on KwilZ, he had seen that inflection before. It came from some very old mythos that few chose to practise today.

One so enigmatic, so withheld that it didn't even have a name outside of 'The Mythology', 'Old Faith' or the derogatory 'Cultist Claptrap'.

'The Benevolence? What's he got to do with it?' KwilZ managed, suppressing a belch.

'That's what I was sayin' lad, havn'tcha seen the papers? It's happenin' all over the place. Not just here in Foxtrot! People just vanish. Gone fer a day, a week o' two, sometimes longer. Then BANG!' He dropped his glass hard against the table to emphasise his point, 'Someone finds them in their bed.'

'You didn't answer my question,' said KwilZ, 'What makes you think this has something to do with the old faith?'

Victor put on a wizened expression, or at least the closest approximation to one.
'Ah, well ye see. All of the people disappear and reappear close enough to midnight. Doesn't matter where you are in the world. Come midnight... poof. Of the Midnight City with yer.'

Midnight City?
Just as he thought. So typical of these old cultists to jump on the mystique of divine intervention. It was made worse in recent years with the emergence of the old faith as a 'new age religion'. A bunch of hippies trying to get in touch with their 'spirituality' in the guise of something old and spooky as far as KwilZ was concerned. But since the old man was buying, he might as well give him his ramble.

'Midnight City? Seems a bit outside the usual spectrum of fire and demons that the old faith professes.'

Victor brought his substantial body upright, he had the look of a man who didn't like to have his beliefs questioned.

'I know, but it's a city alright. A dead wasteland er shadow 'n' nightmare. When you think o' it. What better image is there of a modern society brought ter ruin?'

KwilZ was done listening to this prattle and attempted to divert the subject.
'I forgot to ask. What do you do for a living?'

'Me lad?' Said Victor, I'm a priest.'

'...Typical.' KwilZ muttered.

'The air is choked with dust so thick that at times, all I can do is cough up mud. The buildings, long since burned to husks still stare down accusingly at me from time to time... I think that's how he sees us, the Eye I mean. The Eye of Pandemonium.
He took my friends away and forces me to live my life in this bleak pit of hell. There is no real shelter because, whenever I dig in for the night, the Fleshrenders come, looming across the wastes like hounds out of the darkest pits of hell.
...Dig in for the night. Ha! I almost forgot how stupid that sounds now. There is no day in this place, no way to record the passage of time. Perhaps time doesn't even exist here.
They come for us when we feel safest. Dark as night and even more silent. I haven't slept in days. When I get a chance to, I wake up almost immediately from the nightmares. During the walks, I close my eyes for respite, but the hunger and the fear draw me back to reality... If reality is the right term for this place. There is no release from the dead and hungry city.
...I don't know where the city is exactly, Remedi thought it was a dark insight into the future, where the Eye has run out of flesh to sake his hunger. Fassbender said that this place isn't actually a city, but something so ethereal and evil that the mind rationalises the place into something that reminds us of death and ruination. I believe... I believe we are in Hell, where Pandemonium reigns.'
Medici the Vulture